I half expected to see Welles run towards me

11 April 2009

Harry Mount celebrates the 60th anniversary of Carol Reed’s masterly film The Third Man with a tour of Harry Lime’s postwar Vienna — the true star of the movie

Vienna

Six times a week, the Burg Kino cinema in Vienna shows The Third Man in its small Studio Theatre. ‘It’s best that you book,’ said the polite young man behind the counter in perfect English, when I came along in the morning to see if there were any tickets for the 10.45 p.m. show on Friday night. ‘We sometimes get tour parties and the place is packed out.’

I needn’t have booked after all. Though I was there in honour of The Third Man’s birthday — it’s been 60 years since Carol Reed built his masterly vision out of Graham Greene’s screenplay — the only people in the audience were me, two teenage girls — one in a lilac puffer jacket, another with lurid ginger hair — and two male loners who showed every sign of being regulars. Armed with popcorn, each marched purposefully to a favourite seat (one on either side of the auditorium) just as the film opened to Reed’s voiceover — ‘I never knew the old Vienna, with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm...’.

It’s not hard to see how you could become an obsessive Burg Kino pilgrim. I’ve seen the film half a dozen times in London, but I’ve only now realised that its real star is Vienna — the Prater Wheel and its elegant Victorian carriages, the cobbled streets sprayed with water by Reed to give greater reflected light on celluloid.

I began humming Anton Karas’s zither music to myself as I tramped around the city; heard the ringing gunshots in Vienna’s sewers. The shadow of Harry Lime danced across Michaelerplatz.

Vienna is so much the star that at a dinner in the city’s MAK modern art museum the night before, a young doctor said to me, ‘We never watch The Sound of Music, but we love the Third Man.’

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 Next page

More articles from: Harry Mount | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (5)

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Post comment

Christian Borchsenius

April 8th, 2009 3:28pm Report this comment

‘In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’

According to the biography be Nicholas Farrell, this quote is attributed to a witty dictator, Benito Mussolini.

Caius Marcius

April 9th, 2009 3:58am Report this comment

The 1990s animated series Pinky and the Brain offered a brilliant Third Man spoof - titled The Third Mouse - I found it online in a Polish translation, but you can still see how carefully the cartoonists captured the look of the original film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KQfCZ-sb28

David Short

April 10th, 2009 2:10am Report this comment

Let me be the first to correct Christian Borchsenius (well, at least Orson Welles or Mussolini). It was the Germans (in Bavaria) who were responsible for the cuckoo clock.

Nothing wrong with the cuckoo clock, but just don't blame the Swiss.

Their form of democracy is the best in the world.

If I had to choose between the kind of democracy that produces perpetual war (ahem, the kind practised currently by the US and the UK) and that which allows perpetual peace, freedom and wealth and a legally-required gun in every home (Swiss), I know which I'd choose...

David Short

April 10th, 2009 2:26am Report this comment

PS It's not true that the Second World War and the Cold War have receded into history. They are still being fought. It's just that the French changed sides (or did they?).

Nor is it true that Adolf is Austria's 'least favourite son'.

We British should perhaps pal up with the Russians again.